An outstanding painter of Roman Britain

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Alan Sorrell – A Life Reconstructed

25 October 2013 – 25 January 2014

Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, will be staging the first major survey of the work of Alan Sorrell (1904–74), as the intricate and beautiful works of the English artist, illustrator, teacher and writer, best remembered for his archaeological illustrations, go on show in the Museum’s exhibition gallery this Friday.

Born in South London before moving to Essex at the age of two, Sorrell grew up in an artistic household. Although confined to a bath chair with a suspected heart condition, he spent his early years accompanying his jeweller/watchmaker father, Ernest, on landscape-drawing trips, fuelling his love of the English countryside.

Whilst studying at the Royal College of Art, the shy, withdrawn artist became a key figure amongst an outstanding generation of students including Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden, Charles Mahoney, Barnett Freedman and Douglas Percy Bliss.  In 1928, he won the prestigious Rome Scholarship in Decorative Painting and spent the next two years at the British School at Rome before assuming the role of senior assistant instructor of drawing at the Royal College of Art between 1931 and 1939 and from 1946 to 1948. In 1937 he was elected to the Royal Watercolour Society.

During the Second World War Sorrell joined the Royal Air Force, and painted pictures of air force life in his spare time. In 1941 he was transferred to the Air Ministry, initially applying his skills to the camouflaging of aerodromes. He also received commissions from the War Artists Advisory Committee to record the construction of RAF runways.

Although he worked in a variety of disciplines, Alan Sorrell is best known today for his archaeologically informed drawings of early historical sites and monuments and tableaux of ancient life – particularly his detailed reconstructions of Roman Britain.  He began producing archaeological reconstruction drawings after a chance meeting in 1936 with the archaeologist, Kathleen Kenyon, on a dig of a Roman site in Leicester. She asked him to produce illustrations for an article in the Illustrated London News. This led to further commissions from archaeological writers in Dorset and Wales.

Sorrell’s archaeological drawings and paintings have led to his being included in more public collections than any other 20th-century artist. His work can be found in the Tate Gallery, Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum and the National Museum of Wales, amongst others.

Alan Sorrell, A Life Reconstructed, will celebrate Sorrell’s work as a Mural painter, war artist and commercial illustrator, as well as his eye for archaeological detail and Jerzy Kierkuc-Bielinski, Exhibition Curator at the Soane is excited at the prospect of giving visitors the opportunity to explore Sorrell’s diverseoeuvre:‘I am delighted that this exhibition, the first devoted to the works of Alan Sorrell, will be shown at the Soane’, he comments.

Sorrell did so much through his work to bring to life the lost archaeological sites of Roman and Norman Britain. I hope that this exhibition will bring tolife the important legacy of Sorrell’s life.

‘A Life Reconstructed’has been organized and sponsored by Liss Fine Art, and will travel to The Beecroft Art Gallery, Westcliff on Sea after opening at Sir John Soane’s Museum.

Alan’s son, Richard Sorrell, is himself an accomplished artist whose portfolio is as varied as his father’s. His aerial views echo the archaeological detail that absorbed Alan Sorrell so deeply and he is delighted that his father’s work is being brought to a new audience through the Soane’s forthcoming show:-

My father was a prolific draughtsman and painter, who is perhaps known for the historical ‘reconstruction’ drawings of castles and abbeys, and prehistoric sites, seen as they would have appeared in their heyday, Richard Sorrell explains.

One of the aims of this exhibition and the book that accompanies it is to put the reconstruction drawings in the context of his much larger oeuvre, and to demonstrate that all of his work was the product of an extraordinarily vivid imagination, that could breathe life into a wide variety of subject matter.